Have you made a sale using social media? Tell us your success stories!

A couple months ago, I got a call from the CEO of a fast-growing technology company on the East Coast. We had met at a conference two years ago. At the time, I did what I usually do with people I meet at events – followed up immediately after, invited her to join my newsletter list, put her into my nurture marketing systems, and pretty much moved on.

Then, out of the blue, she called. Her business is exploding, and she wanted help organizing and accelerating her marketing efforts. Less than a week later, she was a recurring-revenue client for our business.

On one hand, that’s one of the fastest deals we’ve closed and the least amount of work I’ve put into a pitch. On the other hand, I worked that deal hard for two years. The CEO had been reading my newsletter, following my blog and Twitter feed, and knew I could help her with exactly what she needed done.

At least 33% of our new business now comes from social media and content marketing.

Social media has been an important part of a number of sales, but has never been the exclusive component. We have a several tiered strategy to progressively increase the engagement with the prospect and ultimately find, qualify and sell a deal.

Places like Twitter, Linkedin Groups, Focus and others are places to start engaging with people-sharing ideas and getting to know them. We try to attract people to our blog site, where they further learn our views, share their ideas in comments, etc. Some people reach out directly with a question (yesterday for example someone came directly from the blog and called me. Often, in the blog we will offer an eBook, a sales aid or some other special piece of content--to create greater value, to learn more of their interests, and to establish a close connection/conversation. Often those result in follow up conversations. The prospect may not have a need to buy at the time, but we then nurture them with a combination of social media "touches," telephone and email touches until they have a need--usually then they reach out with "Can you help....."

I think what we've learned is that Social Media is just one element of a prospecting approach, but we need to build the engagement through multiple channels simultaneously. We never expect someone to tweet us an order--because that's not the way people buy our types of services. But social media is and important component of extending our visibility and awareness in our target markets. For us, last year close to 70% of our net new name business originated through some sort of social media contact--but none of them were closed through a single channel or through social media exclusively.

We have been activating our sales force to use social media as a channel for prospecting. A lot of this involves the authentic use of the channel not just popping up on LinkedIn and announcing that you have something cool you want to show folks.

In any case, just a couple of months ago one of our sales people was on TweetDeck and noticed a person really struggling with a competitive offering to ours. The rep reached out, helped the person with their issue, they began to build a relationship and we took out a competitor from that account within the last few weeks.

I will speak on behalf of Jay Thompson, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, who was recently interviewed by our partner. He had a very inspirational Twitter sales success story. This is briefly what he did:
1- Effective targeting: He setup HootSuite to receive notifications of tweets including keywords "moving" and "Phoenix"
2- Soft Selling: When he received the tweet, he offered his potential clients unconditional help and made it clear that he is willing to answer any questions they have. No pressure! No obligation.
Other Realtors started "harassing" the same people. So, when they needed help for finding a home to buy, they asked for Jay's help.
- This was a very close to a sale but his client's moving plans changed and they ended up not coming to Phoenix but they referred massive number of people to him. (His genuine help turned complete strangers into brand advocates. I love that thought!).
I have barely touched the surface here! Jay's story is loaded with excellent tips and insights that we dedicated an entire blog post to share.
I hope you enjoyed his story as much as I did. I would love to know your thoughts about it :).

Yes, specifically on LinkedIn. One of my challenges as an author is simply to keep up with the sheer volume of email I receive. (Every time I mail to my subscribers I get a few THOUSAND out-of-office auto replies!)

However, now that I've been asking people to connect with me on LinkedIn if they want to reach me directly, that has really removed the email barrier. It's much easier not only to connect with people who read my books, but more importantly, connect to their VPs of Sales and above since those are the people who hire me to come in and train.

I think the Twitter example from Aaron is fantastic and it can be expanded upon by using things like Google Alerts and Yahoo Answers - a realtor could easily set up alerts to find prospects using the same keywords as in Twitter.

Im talking on the behalf of translation company Hieroglifs Translations Romania. We have been successful by using Linked in. People who wish to find out more of our services has joined our group - as the result they are first who find out of our discounts and special offers and are interested in our services.

Twitter has not been too good for us still, but Facebook is also quite effective for us.

We write content for our blog, which we promote in several social channels including Twitter, LinkedIn, and on industry forums and knowledge communities. We've won several clients in part because they follow us in those channels. But in most cases, we also had some sort of offline relationship. For example, I'd proposed services to one company a couple years ago, but didn't get very far. Another had encountered our work two years ago when we served a mutual client.

In all these cases, I've found that LinkedIn played a crucial role. We link our blog to our profiles, and do status updates to promote our content. People regularly tell me that they feel like they're up to speed with what we're doing because of the status updates. In most cases, publishing the content on industry knowledge communities has also had a strong influence. We publish on a site that has strict editorial standards around the content - no advertorials. That site has a strong influence in our target market and has been a powerful resource. (Fortune Magazine recently did an article on marketing techniques that mentioned PropelGrowth and our approach. There are some other great ideas in that issue. December issue, page 52.)

Twitter has not worked for us, and we have not tried Facebook.

Our target market is the financial services industry - banks, brokerages, and financial technology providers.

Since returning from working abroad in 2009, I have created 6 companies purely from using social media. One of my businesses now still creates 80% of our new business via our social networking accounts with Twitter and Linkedin being very strong for us. Linkedin has placed me in front of large business CEO's and I have been already contacted for new business ideas, merging and forming business sybergies. I wouldn't be where I am without all the hours of study and effort I placed in to my Social Networking accounts.